The evolution of and interworking between mobile communication networks and the Internet have led to efforts to converge multimedia services, such as data, speech, audio, video, and other media services, over an Internet Protocol (IP) based infrastructure. As such, the mobile communications industry is in a transition phase from supporting only voice and short messaging services to supporting numerous multimedia services for different types of applications. The traditional voice and short messaging services are being complemented by person-to-person and group applications. These applications allow audio and video streaming, file sharing, multiplayer gaming experiences, and push-to-talk services, just to name a few of the many services to be supported. These services may be combined in a dynamic fashion to further enhance the subscriber's experience.
All of these services require significant amounts of bandwidth, and more importantly, control of allocated bandwidth and the overall control of quality of service (QoS) with respect to communication sessions. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is employing the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) to help bridge the gap between the traditional mobile communication and Internet networks to support these services and provide controlled access and management. In particular, an IMS architecture uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for multimedia session negotiation and management for controlling IP-based communication services. Multiple sessions may be established at any given time for a user, and associated as desired. Once sessions are authorized and established, the IMS architecture should provide a designated quality of service, depending on the type of session established, the user's subscription requirements, or other policies controlling the resources a subscriber should be afforded. The quality of service mechanisms ensure that subscribers are provided with the resources to which they are entitled, while preventing subscribers from using more resources than needed or deserved. Unfortunately, the current IMS architecture only supports SIP-based applications. Non-SIP applications are not supported.
Accordingly, there is a need for a mobile communications architecture that will support various types of non-SIP applications, as well as provide reliable QoS for these applications. There is a further need to provide such an architecture within an IMS framework.